Strength Life Legacy

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Father time follow up.......

....from another Paul, who wrote to me regarding the Father time article the other day. I thought this was pretty awesome.

PC,I’m guessing at 52, about to be 53 in 10 days that I don’t exactly represent the bulk of your followers! But your thoughts on Father time are something that I am, because of age and experiences well aware of.

A few thoughts: people need to get over the fact that skills and max abilities decay more and more rapidly as we age…in other words…Father Time is the all time heavyweight UNDEFEATED champ..to steal your phrase…Death is winning!

People need to come to grips with the simple fact the time is finite. Not to fear it, but to embrace every ounce of every breath out of the time we have. I lift because I can and enjoy it. It’s my own experiment to see for how long and how much my body will roll…One of the interesting things that happens to most everyone as we age is our “comfort zone” begins to shrink. We want to venture out less, things we used do, now spark a little bit anxiety “will I get hurt” ..”I might die doing that”!..lifting for me is just one way to push back against Father time and those shrinking walls..doing a “young” mans LRB 365 is my way of giving Father Time the finger.

To me there are two phases all people pass through at various points in their life. There is the destination phase . Typically in our 20 and 30s we are destination driven..for some its 300lb bench for others 700lb pull! Almost every aspect of your life at that point is destination driven.. The focus is on the end result. As we age, we enter a different stage, no less exciting actually, just different and I call it the journeymen phase..In my 50’s I’m a journeymen who looks for experience and joy of the journey wherever that leads.. sometimes it’s a PR but mostly it’s the satisfaction of merely pushing back against Father time…and to that end…

On August 31st I have a date with destiny…I challenged my 20 year old college athlete son to 100 yard sprint …I will not win unless he is abducted by aliens, I no longer have the right to believe I will win as he’ll be waiting for me in the car by the time I finish..I will do it to experience the joy of the moment.. to share a laugh with my boy, to take some trash talk as my punishment and to show him I still can live life……. just with a different focus!

I just turned 50, and after losing over 100 lbs, beat my 21 yrs old son in the 40 yard dash...for the first time ever...of course, he being a 6 ft 4 in, 305 lbs offensive lineman made it all possible....but still,it was the first time EVER.....Father time might always win in the end, but I won the battle today!!